Editor’s note: Cole Waddell is a Lancaster resident who was living in New York City during the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. He moved back here in 2005. This is the third part of a three-part series about Southerners who shared Christmas dinner there each year.

There is a quotation by Albert Einstein tacked up in my work cubicle. He was a genius when it comes to capillary forces, general relativity, matter-energy equivalence and how light from another star can be bent by the sun’s gravity.

It isn’t Einstein’s ability to comprehend atomic vibrations, wave-point duality and critical opalescence that I respect. Gosh, I have trouble just spelling Brownian motion and thermodynamic fluctuations, much less discerning what all of that means.